Squabbling love rivals, kidnap and squeaky leather trousers: we delve into the Oxford student archive to uncover the spicy past of politicans

FOR Britain’s political elite a shelf full of dark green files in an Oxford
library is holding secrets every bit as embarrassing as those party pictures
on Facebook.

There among the bound archives of Cherwell, the Oxford University student
newspaper, are the youthful indiscretions of the great and the good.

After the revelations last week that Dominic Grieve, now attorney-general, had
been part of a gang that threw the now police minister Damian Green into the
Cherwell River, The Sunday Times has uncovered more alleged misdemeanours
among his colleagues during their university days.

There is the Tory MP who kidnapped a relative of Churchill and displayed him
in a shop window; another who was pictured running round the quad clad only
in boxer shorts and baby oil; the woman Labour MP who disappeared into the
“nookie room” at a party with two young men — and the cabinet minister who
rubbed egg into